Am I thinking about whether or not my life allows for good news? Am I picturing wolves gnawing on my puppet body? I imagine ascending, a voice declaring my passage into a new level. Blind narrative alleyways lead me to the works of playwright David Mercer and to Nadah El Shazly’s forthcoming album Ahwar.

Attention steals a look, Mod-Podges two points previously bound together only by string. Take a crack at myth-hacking, I tell myself. I tried to consult my body yesterday, and while doing so, I detected with some alarm multiple signs of exhaustion, and a sharp pain in my side. “What now?” I wondered. “Diverticulitis?” I coasted along, ate and held down dinner, waved goodbye to another workday. “I was not long in the factory,” testifies Richard Pilling, “until I saw the evil workings of the accursed system — it is a system, which, above all systems, will bring this country to ruin if it is not altered.” The final line of Pilling’s Defence is quite moving: “the masters conspired to kill me,” he proclaimed, “and I combined to keep myself alive.” Lacking that option, however, I slide inexorably toward what Engels described as “utter physical exhaustion.” Nothing will ever again curb the employer-class’s frenzy for exploitation. Objects like red wheelbarrows launch grand openings to great fanfare. It is my reality, yet others are working on me, for better or worse. One must listen for selves who exist in parallel universes. Julie Andrews whistles away the dark, clearing the way for Charles Gross’s Blue Sunshine. The wish remains, however, that a whole new world be born.

“How to them I appear, so to me,” I tell myself when told I’m adorably stoned. Another warns, finger wagging, “Don’t stop! the clock is ticking.” The sound of a head scratch appears high in the mix. I receive instructions: “Cause the mind to change channels.” Unfold into action. Even if just taped comedy and commentary. The universe in the form of my loved one extends to me a clue: a page in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta where two characters talk around Arthur Koestler’s The Roots of Coincidence. I become transfixed, I become transfigured. None of this is mere coincidence. Do I feel angry and concerned about the continued stockpiling of arms among my enemy countrymen? Indeed, very. The center disperses ever faster into two contending camps. The nation-state as real-dimension Pong, with computer-controlled opponents. It is no mere coincidence, I repeat under my breath on my way to a talk by Masha Gessen. Daphne’s death continues to weigh on me, especially on gloomy, rainy days midweek. On such days, I sometimes let paranoid musings get the best of me. I take pleasure in the sensation of web detection. A friend of mine introduces Gessen, who speaks on “Democracy in the Age of Trump and Putin.” World leaders who each wish to become “king of reality.” I establish that she and I are both acutely aware of the things that scare us. But all she does is revisit for the audience (in a packed auditorium, by the way) points from her piece “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.” What we must do, she says, is “other” for others the reality in which we live. Point to the autocrat; reveal him as such. But reveal to whom? Gessen can speak only to a public that reads the New York Review of Books. A group nearly devoid of influence in our new reality. The reality of concentrated power, limited only by the pressure, she says, applied by civil society upon the judiciary. “It’s really hard,” she says, “to think hard in Trump’s America.” All of us are suffering from a kind of “future shock.” As she states this, my eyes are pulled to the right and peer with suspicion at a figure, an intense-looking young white man, who arrives late clutching a mysterious bundle in his hands and who sits up front beside the podium. Spider sense tingling. Have I stumbled inadvertently into an Event, I wonder? Thankfully the suspicion proves baseless. But such is the emotional / affective texture of our time.

Return to me the vision of the post-scarcity Noble Savage. I prefer it to the belief that only a properly constituted society and reformed system of education could make humans good. Able to live in egalitarian plenty. Instead, history is about to culminate in a monstrous epoch of universal conflict and mutual destruction. Collective nouns go silent one by one. The one, because self-conscious, thinks it needs to put itself above others. Hence our current mess. Voices get in our heads. Ghosts. It’s like tinnitus. I no longer want anything to do with the certification industry. That’s all education is anymore. Certification of would-be modern-day plantation owners and Indian-killers. Schools leverage testing, punishment, and the trauma of near-constant boredom in order to transform imaginative beings into cop-worshiping, mortgage-paying members of middle-management. Proponents, armed with nukes, wish to extend this twenty-first century plantation-via-franchise system to all corners of the globe, using “protection of national interests” as justification for perpetual military deployments abroad. Those who perform their duties, those who consent to assessment, are no less complicit than those who lead. I no longer even have the hope of fellow wage slaves waking up and becoming allies of mine, comrades. We’re all too chickenshit. My resentment of myself and others manifests as a total all-encompassing white-hot rage. When others show up to work, I have to work, and vice versa — thus making us mutual enemies. What’s the point? I work all day just to come home and stand in line at fast-food burrito joints. Slop for defeated workers.

Can words get ahead of themselves? “Yes, they can, if one is ‘charged,'” mutters a fiction who another fiction says has no authority here. What about this universalizing thought about the universalization of consciousness? Can one migrate through portals? Is that what we’re reduced to? Is that what we lived through — a mere reality show? You show up in a place, you perform your part. They’ve turned us into mere functional selves — so it’s in our interests to resist. On a short run yesterday, I encountered white arrows painted onto street tops, symbols of unknown purpose left by aliens. Squirrels met me along my way. All, pausing to study me, found me nonthreatening enough to resume foraging for nuts amid piles of leaves. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith provided welcome accompaniment with tracks from her new album The Kid.

Daphne’s orange body appears as an icon, trailing my every move. In “dogged” pursuit — get it? How will I maneuver myself through the remainder of my days? I feel tapped out, emptied of ideas. Capitalism nullifies. It numbs my senses and desires. I have to seek out alternative sources of intensity, like Amon Düül II’s Phallus Dei, or Aase Berg’s Hackers. I become obsessed for a time with Astra Taylor’s ideas about unschooling. I ponder ways to promote student-directed learning in my classes, despite the grade-oriented confines of today’s corporate academy. The problem, of course, is that by the time students reach me, they’ve already spoiled. It would be like offering fresh fruit to a bunch of rotting vegetables: what would be the point?

The change in mood or disposition is nearly instantaneous. I pause to investigate being, even as I continue to review sentences under my breath. I exist, take stock of myself and my surroundings, and then, following the way an exhale follows an inhale, I dictate silent sentences in response, the inner “I” reviewing words according to a learned social rubric. Once satisfied, I trance-scribe the results by hand into a marble, college-ruled Mead composition notebook. I establish these as conditions on which I work. Let all take note. Add to that the poetic cocktail of substances I ingest each day. Compared to Hunter S. Thompson, though, I remain quite the minimalist.

Rock stars, meanwhile, were Joan Didion’s ideal subjects, since they lived a disorder to which she could respond with horror, allowing the dissociative, detached bourgeois self to co-exist in a common story with its time. “The story unfolds,” Didion once said, “as you write it.” Personal phobias and superstitions intersect with the affect of one’s historical moment. One can tell and examine the story of one’s time. The emotional life of late capitalism. Illumination of peripheral detail. Corroboration of the aural through the gestural. There is, alas, a faint delay to be heard, perhaps equivalent to that which exists between an object and its shadow. We try to trust fully in life as would a singularly blessed and accepting child. We observe the embroidery, worked into the day’s pattern to lend verisimilitude. When we look into the light, we’re rearranged, our faces melt, mountains become plains, a foot slips on a banana. It helps when we imagine ourselves in a library. Light shines instead out from behind a cloud; the crowd goes wild.

The impenetrable landscape: action verbs! action verbs! “It is distinctly possible,” warns Joan Didion, “to stay too long at the fair.” Thought is the sequential computation of meaning. The only order I can conjure is the order of the random — trust is how I comport myself. Intuitive being. The media tell us bad people exist, thus pitting the people who do exist against one another. Take all parties of others and re-imagine them as condensed, coiled prose poised to strike. So different from the world-picture as it appeared even just one year ago. Back then, angels used to sing to me when I smoked. By “angels,” I mean (as Blake did) “facets of psyche.” Yesterday didn’t really begin for me until I arrived home near day’s end. The rest of it a teeth-grinding blur, but for a student introducing me to Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Pink Trance Notebooks. How I managed to escape knowledge of this book prior to yesterday, I have no idea. Reading a brief summary, I realize it sounds like it grew out of a process similar to the one informing these trance-scripts. And I have an opportunity, if I want, to join Wayne for dinner sometime next week. What is this power that works through me, joining together and fating into collision right things? After yesterday’s dinner (more ramen!), a Dungeon Master friend invited us over for some tabletop play. D&D night: it is you, a voice says, but you are not it. High luck grants a bonus in particular situations. When you burn your luck, though, kick-ass karma. Are we able to understand the puzzle? Random number Jesus.

My break with Christianity as a teenager made me easy prey for the priests of the Culture Religion. According to this religion, the voice of authority is thought to speak through texts — even those most debased. Hence my capture by the gravity of the Cult-Studs, a tribe of Mind Flayers. Think of it as the tribe of the eternal creative appropriation of reality by reality. The creation as once it was dreamt. We must gather ourselves up, make the climb, become premonitory. Equal parts power and curse tinged with doubt. Wolf and bear icons extend outward from a common center, thus allowing my baked potato to order a baked potato at Wendy’s. Sarah and I scroll through photos of Daphne and then night-walk to a house in our neighborhood known about town for its elaborate Halloween decorations. Birds chirp as accompaniment to cricket-pulse in the moments just before total darkness. These days are numbered, we tell ourselves. Notice them. Be present. Superhuman capability and heroism allow characters to march into a foggy forest. Meanwhile I’m not even in the game, I’m on the bench. That’s not a point of view, that’s a fact, says a voice I’d just as soon discard. No need for reality principles here. Allow consciousness to go wherever it wants to go. It wants land and leisure; ’tis a lie, those who say otherwise.